The chain was a chain and then one day it was a rope and then one day with me off at school the tire fell off and then it was a chain again. My father thought often of cutting down the tree, but never of removing the chain. This is a fact I can only with difficulty explain. Isaiah Berlin (I tell my father) considers freedom in both a negative and a positive sense: either we are not coerced or we alone act. I ask (my father) this: what is to stop you borrowing a bolt-cutter and removing this eyesore yourself? Old oak, shadows across the shingles, dark moss, rot. This is what stops. The chain an umber bifurcation, fragrant with our spent past. Its end, he said, would be 100% unnatural: tree service, chainsaw. Globally-warmed tropical storm. Annihilation of one’s youth must be total if one is to become. When one is gone (Nate, say; twenty-five; my age; once and still my friend) all else must follow, and soon.

Freedom (to Berlin) entails the “absence of bullying and domination” (I relate to my mother). The chain rusts still. Old oak creaks. One night, perhaps a year post-grad, my mother asks about Kate: implicated expulsion, hints at second-hand cohabitation. That same night I climb the chain as high as I can climb. Two, three feet. Tire, swing. Small oscillations. Aching traps, rust-striped fingers. I fall. And still the chain unbroken. Seen from below, an oscillating dot. Me in a heap. The canopy perforated lacing, Victorian morbidity. The sky a lighter dark through the interstices. Veiled God. Scarce worth mentioning at all.